Tips for freeing up your fridge
By Brittney MacDonald, Life & Style Editor
Leftovers are the bane of anyone’s holiday season. New Years Eve, Christmas—it all works out to being one big mess of food that you’ll probably have to eat and/or freeze before it goes bad and you’re stuck with a lengthy bill and a pile of garbage. The problem is getting rid of all that food, but making sure it doesn’t go to waste. So, here’s a list of helpful tips that hopefully will lessen the load on your refrigerator.
For the turkey, ham, or whatever other meat you might have cooked up, a good option to get rid of it is making soup. Generally speaking, after the holidays the parts that are left over are not the choicest cuts of meat. With soup, it doesn’t matter if only dry white meat is left, or if you only have the tough, butt end of a honey glazed ham—the meat in soup isn’t a standalone, it is more used to flavour the broth—and all that soaking will tenderize the meat for you anyway. Though this might sound intimidating, making soup is actually really easy, and there are a thousand post-holiday recipes that specifically focus on reusing leftovers all over the Internet. Plus, if you make too much, soup is a lot easier to freeze, defrost, and store than bits of meat and bones are on their own.
Next up is all that alcohol. I don’t know about you guys, but between party guests bringing wine and champagne, and distant relatives and friends assuming booze is a good gift because of my age demographic, half open bottles of alcohol can be an issue. Vodkas are easy, simply put them in the freezer. Rum, whiskey, and scotch will have a grand ol’ time in your liquor cabinet for years to come. However, perishables like wine and champagne will sour or flatten if you leave them open for too long. Your option for wine is having a post-holiday hang out, complete with sangria. Making sangria allows you to mix all those random half open bottles of wine together—all you need to do is add the fruit. There are recipes online if you’re scared of screwing anything up. For champagne, you’re not required to consume the alcohol. Champagne is one of those alcohols that’s actually really good for your skin, and is completely safe for the environment. So use the leftover champagne as a toner, or add it to a bath to give your skin a refreshing glow. You can also wash your hair with it to make your hair shinier and softer. Just make sure you rinse it out really well. Bonus, beer is also really good for your hair if you have left over six packs you want to get rid of.
My last tip is a more general one. If you have a lot of leftovers, you can start your year off in a charitable way by making up paper bag lunches and delivering them to a homeless shelter or just handing them out as you walk around Vancouver. Nothing beats good karma, especially this time of year.
